On Aphasia:
Indices of things we would rather not know

Li Chen opens her powerful digital photo/video
piece, Aphasia, on black screen, with two silent
texts: "This might not be a documentary film." And then: "But
not a single frame is staged." We don't know yet what Aphasia will
show us, what it is going to be "about", but the gauntlet is down on a
challenge. What relation will my screen experience of her sight and sounds have
to do with our human world, my world, the world I sit in right now, as a
smelling and feeling body? Will it only plunder it for metaphors (the next
words we see/and hear in voiceover are "This is just a story."), creating a
world apart, or will it have other connections and plant itself more firmly as
a touching portion? ("In this story we were in the plaza downtown.") Will it
claim that difficult relationship with truth, or evidence or authenticity that
documentary makes? If so, how? If it might not be a documentary, might
it just as easily be one after
all?

Her complicated work
combines still photo, slide-show movement, moving image, and words in several
registers: English text in the mise-en-scene, intertitles, subtitles; along
with sounds recorded on the scene and in the voiceover. Every possible trick of
non-linear editing is displayed (short of obvious special effects) in just over
ten minutes, without leaving us feeling rushed or overwhelmed. Aphasia is
beautiful and chilling, teetering on the edge of too beautiful for the heavy,
brutal "story" it is charged with telling and showing to our ears and eyes, the
shattering violence of the Occupy Movement of 2012 in California, in the Bay
Area. And its offhanded, possible claim to "documentary" status casts its
kaleidoscopic digital sophistication directly at a current lamentation and
debate.

Cast out of the
darkroom

The lament goes like
this: Photography once presented us with an image of the real because light
from that reality photochemically transcribed the iconic representation of what
the lens saw right there, on the film. But access to that real world is
slipping away as fast as Kodak can close factories. Digital cameras transform
light quite differently, as Hadjioannou puts it: "From this perspective, one
can recognize a movement from a light-based, indexical and analogical medium,
to a code-based, non-indexical and digital medium. The important difference
between the two forms is how they treat the physical world in the creation of
their images."(1)

The indexical
function emerges as the key problem: an index is a kind of signifier in the
system of meaningful human signs that has an intrinsic and not
arbitrary connection to the thing it refers to. Intrinsic: smoke and fire,
footprints and feet, the ring and the phone, the bell and the church, the limp
and its injured leg… the photo and its object. (2) Art theorists have been
discussing the indexical relationship of the photo and its recorded object
since the seventies. Although emphasis has been placed on the index's marking
of that intrinsic, ontological relationship between itself and its referent
(Where there is smoke….), I think that aspect is less important to the anxiety
over loss of the real than the fact that the index is not arbitrary, that is,
not artifacted.

I don't mean that
it's not "man-made" (a telephone is manufactured to ring, after all), just that
its appearance in the world of meaning is not controlled by a person. It
appears, as it were, on its own, beyond agency and individual agenda. If you
call, the phone is going to ring and I cannot stop it by a sheer act of will,
just as I cannot stop myself from leaving footprints (CSI exists as a kind of
paean to the inability of people to control the proliferation of indices to
their crimes.) More than its ontological function, I think it is the sense of
the index's transcendence of human will that gives it its power of seeming
truthful. It feels uncontrollable. If an analog photo indexes the world—and
produces a sense of authenticity—it is because no one can do without the light
on the emulsion. And we fear that the digital cannot truly document "the real,"
being fatally compromised, as many would have, by its detour through the
artifice of computation in its treatment of the physical world.

Isn't it strange
that, in a post-Kantian, post-modern world, we have developed this fascination
with indexicality treated like a holdover for objectivity in representation?
Surely, an object-obsessed, ontological approach to the problem of documentary
(a problem that Li Chen invites with her opening) gets us only so far. Let us
turn from emphasizing the intrinsic to a closer examination of the arbitrary
nature of the indexical function.

Onto the stage,
live

Both film and digital
images are, above all, indices of the event of their making/taking. But as
important as the event of natural light capture for images as documentary is
how they exceed, and include, the agency of the
photographer who makes them. If we shift focus to the photographer's process,
then the analog vs digital difference fades. Li Chen's Aphasia is a perfect
example of how the body of the photographer acts as the index...and insofar as
we are put in "direct" touch with her presence on the scene of the photographic
crime, we are gifted with a sense of being there, (xianchang in
Chinese) alongside her as a person and not simply
because of her skill as a photographer.

This sense of
transportation into another "real" world depends not only upon the material
possibilities of the medium but also and crucially on performance--on the fact
that a medium is shaped by another sensuous human being who affects us and
draws us to their world. We feel them. Li Chen's Aphasia is
bodycentric: bodies in motion, asleep, massed together and alone. Bodies in
parts: hands that hold, feet that march. Bodies that she and the police shoot.
Most effectively, her own body in the hand held loopy motion of the moving
image section, and especially in the intimacy of her voice.

Ordinarily, it is
diegetic sound, recorded and synched with the image that provides the sort of
anchor to the real that indexicality promises. In Aphasia, diegetic
sounds of chanting, church bells, sirens, gunning motorcycles, taser guns
firing, and finally singing, are instead wrapped as a soundtrack around still
images that pop in varying speed between black fades. Occasionally they synch
almost perfectly with the images in exquisite cutting (the black man
screaming…the helicopter hovering), but mostly they do not. They supplement,
they compete, they herd us along, but, like bad Foley, the indexical anchor to
the putative real is not to be found there. Li brilliantly thwarts our
expectations and fulfills that longing elsewhere. Aphasia is an
unabashed work of digital art whose power, for me, lay in its complex feinting
weave of sound and sight. Li Chen connects and disconnects from the unfolding
story—there is indeed a narrative arc—by connecting and disconnecting our own
ears and eyes from each other.

To dance
together

The "real" point of
this work places us with Li Chen "on the scene" (xianchang), to
immerse us in her experience. She does this with her voice in Chinese which
breathes her presence into the film. For the English-speaking audience of this
project, it must always be accompanied by subtitles so we simultaneously see
and hear her speak. Here our ears and eyes unfailingly link. The bilingual will
also appreciate a level of subtlety in the not-quite-perfect fit of the crucial
personal pronouns of "I" and "we" between the Chinese and English.(3) She is
fully in the plaza (English: "In this story we were in a plaza downtown."
Chinese: "Gushli, women zai shi zhongxin do yige
guangchang." 故事里我们在市里中心的一个广场。) She ignores police warnings in both
languages along with everyone else. She risks herself completely as "In this
story, we, were run over by them." But she is not
arrested in Chinese, even as the English refers to "us". And as the battle
begins to rage in the moving image section, she crucially tells us in the
English subtitles "This is just a story, but a story that cannot be told."
while her Chinese voice says, sorrowfully, "Zhei jiushi yige gushi, yige wo
buneng jiangde gushi. 这就是一个故事， 一个我不能讲的故事—This is just a story, a story
that I cannot tell."

Is this a story that
cannot be told in general or one that she cannot
tell? But she has told it—and "not a single frame was
staged". She herself indexes her documentary claim; we can rest assured she was
there. She makes this work out of things, violent and terrible things, that
happened without and despite her and that exist far beyond the reach of all the
digital capacity for artifice and lies in the world. Trusting her presence, we
can sadly be assured they are real.

3. The cosmopolitan
in-betweeness that this project, Love of Sun, celebrates has its rewards.
Seriously.

About Angela
Zito:

In 1979, just as the
Cultural Revolution was ending, I spent three years in Beijing doing historical
research on the social and political importance of rituals performed by the
emperor. During that time, I also worked as dayside copy editor for The China
Daily, China's English-language newspaper, and then as a "newstaster" for the
Reuter's bureau. Having received a PhD from the University of Chicago, I now
teach anthropology and history of Chinese culture and religions at NYU, where I
have directed the Religious Studies Program for the past five years, and
co-founded and co-direct with Faye Ginsburg the Center for Religion and Media.
At NYU I teach both graduate and undergraduate courses. My documentary Writing in Water (2012), about cultural expression in a public place, was shot and edited in Beijing.